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<title>Wanna read a four page paper about meaning in transformative works and by that I mean Homestuck? by 4thvar</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23082013">Wanna read a four page paper about meaning in transformative works and by that I mean Homestuck?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/4thvar/pseuds/4thvar'>4thvar</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Detective Pony, Gen, If Andrew Hussie can give up on making an effort then buddy, Literary Theory, So can I</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 11:02:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,077</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23082013</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/4thvar/pseuds/4thvar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>No?</p><p>Well good, ‘cause this is actually a four and a half page paper about meaning in transformative works by which I mean Homestuck by which i mean Detective Pony.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Wanna read a four page paper about meaning in transformative works and by that I mean Homestuck?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Detective Pony is a strange work; a pastiche of a children’s novel and a meta-fictional fan-work. There are, in fact, two Detective Pony’s: There is Jeanne Betancourt’s lighthearted tale of a group of girls and their love of all things equestrian, and there is Sonnetstuck’s (a pseudonym, to which I can find no signified) tale of little deaths and authorship subsumed, which is pasted over Betancourt’s original as glaring orange text. The resultant plot begins as the story of a lost cat that harbors a dark power and the girls’ quest to destroy it, and ends as a commentary on literary ownership, wherein the girls must decide whether they should rebel and return to Betancourt’s authorial intent or accept the new story produced by Sonnetstuck’s changes.</p><p>Sonnetstuck’s text is supplementary, but this should not be taken as an indication of lowered stature relative to Betancourt’s text. Indeed, in many places Sonnetstuck’s text dominates the page, giving its meaning primacy over Betancourt’s. Take the first paragraph of the selected page in the Appendix; the original text is still partially present, and it gives the general outline of the physical action of the passage – the pony pals search for the cat while riding their ponies. However, the meaning of the passage, the tone and purpose, are given by the secondary orange text. It is this text which gives us insight into the girls’ motivation and desires: Pam’s hatred, Anna’s morbid curiosity and Pawnee’s deleterious drinking problem. Beyond this, Sonnetstuck’s text gives an internal life to Pam’s pony, Acorn, which was not present in the original text, and changes the fundamental nature of Pawnee from a girl (whose original name, Lulu, is wiped away) to a small township, whose paradoxical nature is the source of her serious problem. The question then arises: if Sonnetstuck’s text is dominant, why is it designated the supplement?</p><p>The answer is that it is a necessity if we regard Betancourt’s text as original. In regarding Betancourt’s text as “original” we, by necessity, treat Sonnetstuck’s addition as secondary, but why accept Betancourt’s text as the original? It is because while Sonnetstuck’s text presupposes the existence of Betancourt’s, Betancourt’s makes no such concession for Sonnetstuck’s. Though it is certainly supplementary, in that it adds meaning to Betancourt’s text, it is by no means merely supplementary. Betancourt’s text should not be regarded as the primary source of meaning in the text; neither should Sonnetstuck’s. The meaning of Detective Pony is contained not within the aggregate of the two texts, but in the opposition between them. The term supplement, then, is misleading, though not inappropriate. Sonnetstuck’s text is not simply an addition to Betancourt’s, it is a transformation of it, a substitution of Betancourt’s meaning with a new message, thus encompassing the second meaning of the French suppleer. The mechanism of this transformation is opposition; the familiarity of Betancourt’s inane children’s story is given an ironic meaning outside of itself by the contrast of Sonnetstuck’s editing, and likewise Sonnetstuck’s fable of meta-fiction is meaningful only because there is a story which it has changed, and which its characters long to return to.</p><p>What is true in Detective Pony can be applied to all transformative works: in these cases, neither the original nor the supplement take primacy in their shared meaning. The meaning of both is found in Différance, in the opposition between their individual contents. This is not, however, the Différance of Mutton and Sheep, because while in this classical example there is a signified which both pre-suppose, and which both share, the Différance of the transformative work (the signified) is pre-supposed only by the supplement. Per Derrida the supplement “may always not have taken place”, and it is tempting to conclude from this construction of the transformative supplement that the original text does not contribute to the meaning of the transformative work, but this is an unnecessary conflation of intention and result. While the original does not pre-suppose the supplement and the transformative meaning, it does leave room for it. By writing a naïve children’s story, for instance, Betancourt leaves room for a subversion of this message by works such as Sonnetstuck’s. Thus, the standard order of the signified-signifier is altered; whereas Mutton/Sheep must emerge simultaneously to have meaning, in the case of transformative works, the original signifier emerges first with a different signified and no indication of the coming Différance, and the signified Différance and the supplement signifier emerge simultaneously, subsuming the original signified and co-opting the original signifier.</p><p>To the casual observer of this process the Différance seems to emerge solely from the addition of the supplement, but because the supplement pre-supposes the existence of the original, depends on it even, the Différance takes its place suspended between the two signifiers. After all, Différance only emerges when concepts conflict. Though this relationship between original and supplement is necessarily lopsided (the supplement depends on the original, but not vice versa), in the context of the transformative work they are equalized. The meaning of the work seems to exist independently of either individual piece, and, paradoxically, it depends on both.</p><p>To what extent, then, can the original claim ownership of the meaning of the transformative work? One last concept is necessary to answer this question. We must distinguish between the active and the passive text. Because the original cannot possibly anticipate all its possible supplements, it is implicitly passive in the transformative process. The original’s message is static, it cannot adapt to the supplement, but the supplement, succeeding the original, responds actively. Thus, the original can claim ownership only of what remains unaltered, while the supplement can claim ownership of not only the supplementary text, but also the meaning produced by its addition, i.e. the Différance.</p><p>If we return to the example of Detective Pony, this indicates that while Betancourt’s text can be said to be the progenitor of the story to which the characters long to return (the original, naïve story), the concept of the return itself, and all the meta-fictional implications that entails, are descended from the addition of the Sonnetstuck’s supplement. This account of the descent of meaning is inherently historical, with its pre-suppositions and temporal conception of the supplement-original relationship, but that is where the strength of the argument lies. In designating the original as temporally distinct from the supplement, in other words, ordering the texts, the meaningful Différance can be ascribed to that which transforms, and not that which is transformed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Betancourt, Jeanne. Detective Pony. Sydney: Scholastic, 2007. Print.<br/>Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." Societe at the Sorbonne. Ampitheatre Michelet, Paris. 27 Jan. 1978. <br/>Project Lamar. Web. 7 Feb. 2017.<br/>Sonnetstuck. "Detective Pony." Archive of Our Own. Archive of Our Own, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 7 Feb. <br/>2017.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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